Ukulele of Death, page 8
The only real leads I had among living people were Evelyn’s adoptive parents, Howard and Cicely Bannister, and her birth mother, Melinda Cantone. Since the Bannisters were undoubtedly dealing with the loss of their daughter at the moment and probably didn’t know anything about the birth father anyway, the obvious move was to contact Melinda, but we’d tried that and come up short, which was not typical for me. It was possible she was unaware of her daughter’s death. That made me pause a moment.
There was, therefore, a long moment before I picked up the landline phone on my desk, which I use for business calls because you never actually lose a connection on a landline and besides, that way I don’t have to give clients and business associates my cell number. I dialed the number Evelyn had given me for Melinda.
And was treated to an automated message indicating that the number I’d dialed was not in service. OK, so that wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it was getting to be a pattern. Evelyn had given me the number only a few days before. The idea that Melinda had somehow gotten wind of the investigation and changed her phone number wasn’t impossible, but it was pretty unlikely. I tried the number twice more and got the same result. The only conclusion was that Evelyn had been lying. But I kept trying.
Usually it’s easy to locate someone on the internet; I should have had a location on Melinda by now. But this was different because there simply weren’t any listings – at all – regarding anyone with that name in that city. That’s pretty rare. Usually when I’m searching for a birth parent trying not to be found the biggest problem is sorting through the myriad options that assault my eyes. In this case, there were none.
The only reasonable conclusion to reach was that there was no such person as Melinda Cantone, and certainly none in Bethesda, Maryland.
I’d figured Evelyn Bannister was lying. I just hadn’t realized how much.
Given that information, I immediately began searching for Howard and Cicely Bannister at the address Evelyn had given me for them.
I’m assuming you know what I found there, too.
Now my problem was not simply finding out who Evelyn Bannister’s father had been. It was discovering who Evelyn Bannister really was.
TWELVE
‘So this woman you were working for turns out not to be the woman you were working for?’ Rich Mankiewicz squinted a little bit at me, as if I were far away. I wasn’t far away. I was on the other side of a relatively small table at Pasta Perfect, which was specifically not a Thai restaurant, given that the place Mank had heard about had closed a month after opening. Welcome to New York.
‘She gave me a false name and told me a false story,’ I said. Mank was a cop and I was a private investigator. Even on what he insisted was a date, there was no chance we’d be able to converse without a level of shop talk. Besides, Ken was still being a brat and wouldn’t answer my texts, even when I’d told him about Evelyn Bannister’s deception. Fine. Let him act like a five-year-old. I was the grownup. I’d already told on him to Aunt Margie, who agreed I was the grownup. ‘Now I have to figure out who she was, and I’m hoping the cops who are investigating her death took fingerprints and dental records.’
Mank smiled his little smile, which I’d decided wasn’t nearly as charming as he seemed to believe. OK, maybe a little charming. ‘It seems like a lot of your business relies on having police officers find things out for you,’ he said.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘If this is you trying to get on my good side you’ll be lucky to get a good-night handshake.’
‘I’m relying on your innate ability to see what a good guy I am at my core.’
‘I have no intention of seeing your core, Mank. But since you brought it up, what did you find out about my late lamented pal Dr Mansoor?’ I dug into my spaghetti primavera, which was a way of convincing myself I was eating mostly vegetables. I wasn’t, but it was close enough.
Mankiewicz finished his bit of veal piccata and wiped his mouth, which was a good move. ‘So you do want to know what the police can do for you,’ he said.
‘I called you for that very reason,’ I said. It was a little mean, but not a lot.
He nodded, acknowledging (in my mind) my wit and letting it go rather than trying to top me. ‘Dr Aziz Mansoor was a pathologist, born in Milwaukee, who moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey thirty-two years ago when he was a medical student at Rutgers University. He worked in a lab with a Dr Olivia Grey for a while there, then went on to be a resident at a hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota and decided he liked it there when he met a woman named Maria Gonzalez, whom he married. They had two kids, both of whom are now in their late twenties.’ He told me all that without referring to notes or even checking his phone. Either he had a very impressive memory for facts or he was making it all up, which seemed especially unlikely given that he’d mentioned the name my mother was using when she was at Rutgers.
Olivia Grey! So Dr Mansoor wasn’t lying, and now he was dead and couldn’t give me the message he’d tried so hard to deliver. I looked at Mank and tried – probably unsuccessfully – to mask the excitement my mother’s name had stirred in me. ‘What was he doing in New York?’ I asked, and I think my voice stayed steady.
Mank, just into another bite of dinner, once again took his time before answering, which I appreciated. Nothing turns me off faster than someone who talks and lets you see what they’re eating. Then he took a sip of wine (which I did not drink because I don’t drink because … it’s a phobia; I feel like I don’t know what alcohol would do to me. Ken does not share this particular worry) and nodded.
‘He and his wife moved back here about six months ago,’ he answered. ‘Dr Mansoor wasn’t retired, exactly, but he’d stopped working at the hospital in St. Paul and was consulting, mostly as a medical examiner for a small town in Minnesota. He apparently gave that up too and came to New York, where he was working two days a week at New York Presbyterian Hospital.’
‘As a medical examiner?’ There were ways that might have had some connection to work Mansoor might have done with my parents all those years ago.
But Mank shook his head. ‘Reading MRIs and PET scans,’ he said. ‘Seemed like very routine work from what I could tell.’
Maybe there was another way he could lead me to my parents. ‘Was he traveling recently?’
Mankiewicz chuckled. ‘I’m a cop, not his personal secretary. As far as I can tell Dr Mansoor had not been out of the country in the past four years, since a trip to India with his wife. Lately he might have traveled for business or gone on a long weekend but there’s no evidence he’s done any extensive traveling.’
Well, that was disappointing. ‘Well thanks, Mank,’ I said. ‘I appreciate you looking into it for me.’
Mankiewicz had a subtle smile on his face. I’m not sure if it was calculated to be appealing to me or if he just thought something was amusing. ‘Two things,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘First, stop calling me “Mank” on a date. You can call me Rich.’
I shook my head involuntarily, not in a negative way but just because I didn’t believe this was what we were discussing. ‘We’re doing this? Really?’ I asked.
‘Oh, hell yes. I’ve even figured where I can stand one step up to kiss you when I drop you off.’
‘Two steps up.’
‘Do you want to hear what the other thing is? Because it’s about your Dr Mansoor and I think you’ll be interested.’
Well, he had me there. ‘OK, Rich,’ I said. ‘What’s the other thing?’
‘The FBI had a file on Aziz Mansoor.’
Whoa. That stopped me. I felt my eyes narrow as I tried to grasp what Mankiewicz had said. ‘Why?’ I managed.
He looked surprised. Not as surprised as I must have, but still. ‘You think the FBI tells me anything?’
‘Then how do you know they had a file on Mansoor?’
Mank – sorry, Rich – sat back and assayed his piccata, which was only about half eaten. My primavera, on the other hand, was no longer a viable reality. He – Rich, not the primavera – looked me in the eye and the smirk just barely snuck back onto his face. ‘I do know a couple of feds, but nobody who can open a buried file.’
He was playing innocent but I had known the man for a while now and I could spot an act when I saw it. ‘You wouldn’t be telling me about this if it didn’t have something good in it,’ I told him. ‘Let’s hear it.’
Mankiewicz leaned forward with so much enthusiasm I thought he’d knock the piccata off the table; he’d been holding back as long as he could stand. ‘Turns out our friend Dr Mansoor had a certain interest in eugenics.’
I must have blinked a couple of times because the room went dark then light then dark then light really fast, but I hadn’t done so with any conscious effort. ‘Eugenics? Like genetic engineering to create people with …’
‘Certain characteristics considered superior, yes,’ Mank (in my head I was back to that) said. ‘It seems he picked up the bug from Dr Olivia Grey back at Rutgers. Now there was a mysterious figure.’
It occurred to me at that moment – and to my shame not a second before – that asking Mank for help on anything involving my parents might have been a really big mistake. But it was too late to turn back on it now. ‘Mysterious how?’ I croaked out. I don’t think Mankiewicz noticed my tone because he was so excited about telling me his amazing findings.
‘About three years after Mansoor left for Minnesota, our pal Dr Grey and her husband …’ Mank stopped to think of the name and I almost blurted it out but stopped myself at the last possible nanosecond. ‘Wilder, I think his name was. Brandon Wilder. Yeah. Anyway, they left New Jersey and there are absolutely no records of them anywhere since then. In fact, there are no records of Wilder and Grey before she came to Rutgers.’
‘So they were ghosts?’ Maybe I could joke Mankiewicz off the topic.
No such luck. ‘Far from it. They, or more to the point, she was a prominent scientist working on … wait for it … genetics when Mansoor happened into her lab. He wrote a paper on the possibilities of eliminating such things as birth defects and genetic predispositions to dangerous childhood diseases before the child was born, in fact at the cellular stage.’
This was more science than I could handle, which made me ashamed to call myself – privately – Olivia Grey’s daughter. Forget the research. ‘So what happened to these two scientists after they left Rutgers?’
‘I told you, nobody knows. Obviously they changed their names for some reason, maybe split up, I don’t know. I haven’t had the chance to look into research in that area that took place after their disappearance but I’ll bet they were still out there, at least for a while, and the FBI wanted to know about it so they opened a file on Mansoor.’
‘Are there FBI files on Grey and Wilder?’ I asked, giving my mother top billing. If there were such documents it would be possible, if difficult, to get my hands on them and that would be invaluable.
But Mankiewicz shrugged. ‘How would you even know where to look? If Grey and Wilder are listed as aliases on some other FBI file it would take a really deep dive to find them, and my source doesn’t have that kind of access.’
The conversation drifted after that but I found myself thinking about how to research the possible research federal law enforcement might have done on my parents. Was the FBI the reason they’d had to leave and put Aunt Margie in charge? Could the FBI have files on Ken and me?
When I could focus again Mank was talking about Bendix and his search for coffee that was worse than what he could get near the precinct house. ‘He won’t be happy until he finds something that would take paint off his car,’ he said, looking at me to see if I was amused.
I forced myself to focus on the person in front of me rather than the two who had been absent since I was very young, and found that Mankiewicz was actually a pretty likable dinner companion. He listened when I talked, which was a fairly unusual experience, and didn’t let his eyes wander too far from my face, which I appreciated. When he talked, he was pretty sharp and had an eye for detail you find in good detectives, so he knew how to tell a story. By the time we’d sworn off dessert and I’d had an espresso to his decaf latte (caffeine doesn’t bother me at all), I found myself feeling glad I’d accepted his invitation after all.
Mank paid the check despite my offer to split the bill with him. ‘Next time,’ he said and I did not question the possibility of another such evening. I decided to take it on a case-by-case basis and worry when he asked me out again, which I was certain he would do.
When we stood up to leave I noticed the stares from the crowd. After all, I was more than a little taller than my date and people still think that’s strange or funny. I did hear a few chuckles in the room.
Apparently, so did Mankiewicz. ‘The hell with the two steps,’ he said quietly halfway to the door. Then in one swift motion he turned, dipped me down so he could reach me easily and kissed me like men do in the movies. And the man knew how to kiss.
Startled as I was, I actually enjoyed the moment. Then Mank let me back up and we walked to the restaurant exit.
The crowd applauded as we left.
THIRTEEN
I had trouble sleeping that night, not least because my stupid brother never came home.
He’d answered only one text with the words, ‘I’m OK,’ and answered no other questions. So I wasn’t really worried about him so much as pissed off. But there were more issues to consider.
For one thing, was I dating Mankiewicz now? We’d kissed a little bit more when I dropped him off at his apartment. Kissing is like potato chips: It’s really hard to stop after one. But Mank didn’t want to be seen by other cops from his precinct, a number of whom lived in the neighborhood, and I didn’t want to go upstairs to his apartment because I was queasy about what might happen if I did. We said goodnight and I went home to lie in bed and not sleep.
When I woke up (and checked Ken’s bedroom, confirming he hadn’t used it) I was determined to find the man who might have been the birth father of the woman who was probably not Evelyn Bannister. Because of course it would be a snap to find someone you weren’t even sure existed.
I started once I got to my office (having assiduously avoided trying to find Ken) by calling The Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans, a real organization that consists largely of people who make guitars and other such musical devices by hand. I figured they would know about collectors of unusual instruments, and after some serious explaining about who I was and what I did, I got on the phone with Bryan Foster, the Association’s vice president (they didn’t have a publicist or promotions director), who said he’d been making guitars himself for more than seventeen years. And that was quite impressive. I tried to assemble a table from Ikea once and that was why we ate on an old door propped up on sawhorses.
‘There are some groups of collectors. We actually make most of the instruments and they’re mostly guitars we deal with, that’s our focus, so we don’t work with rare or antique pieces that much,’ Foster said when I’d explained my interest in an obscure and – to everyone but a bidder in the UK – not terribly valuable ukulele.
‘Are you in touch with any other groups that might have a better idea?’ I asked.
‘Well, hang on.’ Foster sounded like he was rifling through some papers. I got the impression the Association worked largely from its officers’ homes but I didn’t know that for certain. I pictured Foster as a man in his fifties with a mustache behind a cluttered desk in a home office. But for all I knew he might very well have been a hipster with ironic facial hair picking a steel string guitar in a recording studio and taking a moment out to talk to some crazy lady about a Hawaiian instrument because he found it amusing. Phones are inexact instruments. If I’d cared enough about what he looked like I could have FaceTimed him, I suppose. ‘I’m not saying we don’t keep our eyes on things. I saw the story about that uke selling for all that money in England.’
Aha. So Foster was being cagey. ‘What did you think?’ It’s good to let the subject think he is leading the conversation.
‘I thought that was an awful lot of money to spend on a uke, any uke. There’s no such instrument that’s so rare it would get that high a bid. I know people who could hand-make a custom ukulele that would be state of the art and one-of-a-kind, and it would fetch maybe fifteen hundred bucks. That thing went for over a million. That’s crazy.’
So nothing I didn’t already know. ‘Any idea why someone might be that crazy?’ I asked.
I could hear Foster shrug. ‘I dunno. They’re smuggling drugs in it?’ Funny guy.
‘A million dollars’ worth of any drug would take up more space than a ukulele and weigh more than one, too,’ I pointed out. Sometimes you have to let the other person know you’re actually not an idiot.
‘Actually, there are baritone ukuleles that are about the size of an acoustic guitar,’ Foster said, proving once again that idiots never think they’re idiots. ‘But I take your point: Even if you filled one with cocaine, it probably wouldn’t be worth a million and any customs agent would notice the weight his first day on the job.’
There wasn’t much point in continuing the conversation. ‘Well, thanks,’ I told Foster. ‘I hope I didn’t take up too much of your time.’
‘Hang on,’ he said, sounding disappointed. ‘Don’t you want to hear about the ukulele collectors I know?’
I was pretty sure I’d asked him about that already, but if he had names … ‘I sure do,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to be a bother.’ A bother? Who talks like that? Was my battery running low again so soon?
‘No bother at all.’ Foster was playing along with my conversation from a British movie of the 1930s. ‘There are twenty-three people I know who actively collect ukes.’
